The Cost of Withholding Information as Brooklyn Murder Cases Are Reviewed

The Brooklyn district attorney has claimed that he does not have to say what murder cases a retired detective testified in, even though the detective gave evidence in public trials, juries reached guilty verdicts and judges pronounced sentences.

Last month, the office of the district attorney, Charles J. Hynes, formally rejected a request for a list of those cases, involving some 50 convictions in the 1980s and 1990s, that had been made by a reporter for The New York Times.

And last week, for good measure, Mr. Hynes’s office also rebuffed the executive director of New York’s Committee on Open Government, Robert J. Freeman, who had written that records of information revealed “during a public judicial proceeding must be disclosed, unless the records have been sealed.”

For decades, prosecutors in Brooklyn sent people to prison for murder on testimony from the detective, Louis Scarcella, and the witnesses he dug up. He presented the same crack-addicted prostitute as a witness to four separate murders.

The remarkable record was matched by the language of the suspects who Mr. Scarcella said confessed to him: time and again, he quoted the defendants in at least six other murders using very similar words. Only one of those confessions was recorded.

In March, Mr. Hynes’s office moved to overturn the murder conviction of David Ranta, who was arrested 23 years ago by Mr. Scarcella. A witness in that case had come forward to say that he was pressed by investigators to identify Mr. Ranta as the gunman who killed a Hasidic rabbi during a botched robbery. Other evidence had “degraded,” a prosecutor told the court.

After The Times found that the same prostitute had been used as a witness in the four separate cases, Mr. Hynes ordered a special unit in his office to examine about 50 convictions that Mr. Scarcella was involved in. The approach in Brooklyn — to conduct a kind of full-scale audit because irregular practices came to light — is one that has long been advocated by criminal justice reformers. Prosecutors are always supposed to be alert to possible miscarriages of justice, but human nature often blinds them to mistakes that they may have a hand in.

To avoid that trap, Mr. Hynes set up a team of prosecutors two years ago to conduct “conviction integrity” investigations when concerns are raised that a guilty verdict may have been unjust. Few prosecutors in the country have been so aggressive. In March, he gave that unit the job of reviewing the convictions of 50 people arrested by Mr. Scarcella. Many of them took place before Mr. Hynes was elected, but could involve prosecutors still in the office.

“We do not talk about ongoing, active investigations,” said Jerry Schmetterer, a spokesman for the district attorney. “We consider that confidential.”

Of course. The state open records law usually does not require law enforcement to release information about open investigations. But that is not what was being sought here: The Times reporter, Frances Robles, was asking what trials Mr. Scarcella had been involved in. Those cases are closed, with judgments entered.

No, Mr. Hynes said, they have been reopened. So the records are closed, he asserted.

His spokesman said on Thursday evening that that might change.

“It doesn’t mean that at some point we’re not going to make a report on where we’re at,” Mr. Schmetterer said.

In addition to his Conviction Integrity Unit, Mr. Hynes has set up a panel of outside authorities to review cases that his in-house lawyers think are suspicious. Some of those on that panel are old friends or colleagues of Mr. Hynes; by hoarding information, the district attorney runs the risk of making people doubt the panel’s work.

The inquiry into the Scarcella cases has already been advanced by people with no connection to Mr. Hynes or his office. Since Mr. Ranta was released in March, another convicted man, Shabaka Shakur, has been granted a hearing by a judge to explore the circumstances of the police work in his case. Moreover, the peculiar echoes in the confessions taken by Mr. Scarcella were discovered not by the district attorney’s office, but by Ms. Robles through her reporting for The Times.

Even if the law didn’t require the release of a list of Scarcella cases, this is more than a squabble over names on a piece of a paper. At stake is how a prosecutor manages the tricky business of honorably reviewing what may be mistakes made by his own office.

E-mail: dwyer@nytimes.com

Twitter: @jimdwyernyt

A version of this article appears in print on July 12, 2013, on Page A15 of the New York edition with the headline: The Cost of Withholding Information as Brooklyn Murder Cases Are Reviewed. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe